


Haunted

by Viridian5



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Angst, Drama, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 1998-10-10
Updated: 1998-10-10
Packaged: 2017-10-02 09:36:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,958
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4933
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Viridian5/pseuds/Viridian5
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The past always colors the present.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Haunted

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers for "Gethsemane," "Redux I," "Redux II," and _The X-Files: Fight the Future_.
> 
> Thanks to Alicia, Dawn, and Dawn for advice. Special thanks go to Small Woodinat Creature, who understood and told me to go for it, and That Wonderful Woman Dawn, my beta maestro.

_"Today I saw a train roll by the river,  
Blowing off its steam,  
Reminded me of me.  
That's when I threw the bottle in the river.  
That's when I started running for the train.  
There's nothing that you need I can't deliver.  
Carry me away,  
Carry me away..."_  
  -- "Carry Me Away" by Concrete Blonde  
\-------------------------------------------------------------------

"Careful you don't get caught on the wires, Scully," Mulder said as he squeezed through a ragged hole in the fence.

"It took you three seconds to find this. Remembering your delinquent years?" Scully asked.

"You never hung out at the railroad tracks when you were a kid?"

Mulder held a tree branch away, so it wouldn't swat Scully in the face. The orange illumination from a nearby streetlight bled through the tangled vegetation, enabling them to see and avoid holes.

"I never had any near me. We cruised the main strip at night."

"Not so different. The kids I knew did too, sometimes. In the middle of the suburban wasteland, you take what you can get."

"What are you expecting to find here, Mulder?"

"I'm wondering why Timothy Schmit saw his cousin's ghost here when Aaron died in a car crash miles away from any tracks."

"Maybe he didn't see a ghost. He could have been drunk. The Breathalyzer gave a high reading for him. Timothy survived that crash. Maybe he's dealing with a serious case of survivor guilt."

Mulder smiled at the familiarity of their give-and-take, even as her "survivor guilt" comment nipped at him. He knew all too well what that was like. "Then what killed Chris Meadows? 18 is a bit young to have a spontaneous heart attack, especially when he had no pre-existing conditions. The autopsy found no reason for his heart to have just stopped. Whatever they saw seems to have scared Meadows to death."

They stepped out into the open space surrounding the tracks and scrambled over loose stones. Scully said, "What physical evidence could a 'ghost' possibly leave for you here?"

"That's what I'm hoping to find out."

Broken glass and crushed cans on the ground gleamed like jewels and precious metals, the moonlight's spell giving them a glamour they didn't deserve. In the daylight Mulder knew he would see rust on the side of the rails and discolored, splitting wooden slats, but the night made everything look better. Familiarity gnawed at him, until he smelled tar, beer, and the acrid stench of the rails. Then memory bit down hard and wouldn't let him go.

//On my third beer of the night, I sat on cold stones by myself and felt the chill lodge in my bones. Gleaming tracks seemed to go on to infinity under the blue-black sky. Some of that infinity had to be a better place than here, didn't it?

//Didn't it?

//Maybe not.

//I was waiting for the train.//

It was one of the perils of an eidetic memory that trivial things could so easily trigger old memories. Another, that those recollections never faded in detail or potency. Mulder knew this one led to an especially painful place, but it felt important. In that moment, standing under a different night sky at a different time and place, he became that maudlin, self-conscious, drunken teenager again on one of the darkest nights of his young life.

//Mom found refuge in Valium, Dad in his whisky, but neither ever worked for me. Alcohol especially only gave my pain a harder, deeper bite.

//Dad would say I deserved that suffering for my failures. "You are so right, as always, Dad," I muttered to myself as I saluted the moon with my bottle. The beer tasted acrid, almost malignant, to me, furthering my self-punishment. It had to be the taste of failure itself.

//There was nothing like a good wallow to show you how low you really were.

//I could be out getting drunk with the other kids, hanging out and getting into stupid trouble, but I preferred to drink alone. Preferred to _be_ alone. People left you, either by disappearing in the night or by being there but pretending you weren't. People always disappointed you, turned on you. It was what they did. They couldn't help themselves.

//And I didn't want to fail anyone else.

//Or let anyone else see what a stupidly maudlin drunk I could be.

//Exhaustion dragged at me, but I couldn't sleep. When _she_ disappeared, my ability to do that went with her. Since then, I had faced nights of light dozes broken repeatedly by nightmares, and nights of lying awake with only my own thoughts echoing through my head. Either way, I'd spend hours staring at the ceiling, with the rest of the world asleep and distant.

//I was tired of myself, tired of fighting to get my parents to love me again, tired of them, tired of _her_...

//I had tried again this morning with Mom. Maybe they had just been too busy to do anything yesterday; they couldn't have forgotten. Maybe Dad would call today from his assignment in Montana, and I could get a chance at him too.

//But I held out no real hope on Dad. It would have to be Mom.

//I'd had said good morning to her and playfully asked if she remembered what yesterday had been. I hadn't let even a hint of reproach, blame, or pain color my voice. She had smiled vaguely without looking up and continued to sip her tea. She didn't say anything to me at all before I left for school.

//At the ripe old age of 16 (happy birthday to me...), I had already lost everyone I cared for. My sister gone because I didn't do my job as a big brother when Dad left me in charge as man of the house that night. Mom and Dad still physically there but not _with_ me, not where it counted. Missing, Sam seemed to have more presence to them than I did standing right in front of them. It sometimes made me feel like I didn't exist at all...

//The stress of Sam's disappearance had torn their marriage apart, left them separated from one another in all but physical fact. Left Mom looking resentful, her every look my way asking me why I remained when her daughter had disappeared. Dad's face held little but blame and cold contempt.

//I had tried to make them proud of me, working hard to become the head of my class and to make the basketball team. I had awards and commendations in plenty. It meant nothing to them. They would never forgive me for being safe in the house while she was missing.

//I couldn't go home tonight because I didn't really have one.

//I felt tears rising and fought them down. Tears got a hotter reaction from Dad, that was for sure, in backhanded slaps and molten rage that lurked under the ice of his usual self. "You don't even know what pain is! Do you want me to show you?"

//Once upon a time, I would cry deliberately, just to get an emotional reaction from Dad. I stopped that after one of my crying jags inspired Dad to throw a chair through the glass sliding door. That night his eyes had glittered like mirrors being shaken in their frames. Those eyes told me that he was capable of unrestrained violence against his own son. I tried to avoid provoking him ever after.

//I saw approaching lights in the distance one way and endless miles of open track in the other. They could take me far, far away, but I doubted I could end up anywhere better.

//Then again, maybe I could. I knew why I had come here now.

//As the roar and keening whistle grew louder, I stood up and walked into the trough between the rails. With an increasing feeling of clarity and peace, I turned to face my ride. When I threw the empty bottle against the rails, I couldn't help smiling at the sharp, crashing sound it made as it shattered. It sounded final. The approaching train looked liked a darker, moving cutout in the night. Except for the flashing lights.

//The lights.

//I couldn't move. Terror and a bone-deep feeling of loss gripped me along with paralysis as the flickering lights froze me in place. I couldn't see through the glare, and I heard someone screaming, and I could swear it was a girl, and she was screaming words, but I couldn't make them out, even as I sensed that she yelled the same word over and over again, and I was helpless and couldn't move _again_...

//NOT LIKE THIS! FIGHT! MOVE!

//I closed my eyes and screamed...

//...and came to with blood in my mouth, deafened by the roar of the train thundering next to me. Frigid stones poked into every square inch of my body, especially where impact with the rocks had ripped holes in my jeans, while my eyes stung from the grit whipped up by the wind. I could feel my heart pounding, and my breath rasped in and out in great gulps. I felt slimy with cold sweat.//

Back then, Mulder hadn't understood what he'd seen. He smiled to himself at the thought of all the Scully-style explanations he'd tried--a flashback, an odd case of the DTs, a memory--with the first two simply not working and the last one almost shutting down his mind every time he'd tried to think about it.

//I had stepped on the tracks full of a rare sense of purpose and rightness. That had lasted about three seconds. Despite the terror and paralysis, something in me had thrown me out of the way of that train. Some piece of me still wanted to live.

//I just had to figure out why.//

While Mulder had a tendency toward depression, he never went that low again until the night he talked to Kritschgau and Scully told him that he was responsible for her cancer. Ironically, the Consortium's surveillance of him had given him a reason to keep on going, a righteous anger at the secrets and lies no one else saw or could uncover.

Once, he had hated feeling ignored. Now, too many people paid him too _much_ attention. He appreciated the irony.

Mulder knew he'd won some victories. It seemed that they had defeated Scully's cancer, he had recently seen things that had renewed his faith in the beliefs that had shaped his career, the X-Files had gained ever more credibility with the bureau, and Scully had stayed with him of her own will. All of that could still change again, but... The low points only made the highs, however temporary or fragile, more precious.

//This is me thinking positive. The horror...//

"Mulder?" Scully asked, her hand on his arm. He could feel the warmth of her touch through his trench coat.

"I'm fine. How long was I in orbit?"

"Just a few minutes."

From the look on her face, Mulder guessed that his own had revealed more of the emotions involved with that memory than he would have wanted her to see. He treasured her for letting him decide whether to bring it up or not.

"I just saw a few ghosts of my own, Scully." The past colored the present... Then it fit. "I think Aaron may be haunting his cousin, instead of this site."

She smiled. "You got that from staring into space for two minutes?"

"What, you were under the impression that _I_ understand my own mind?"

Her smile widened. "I still don't think it's a ghost."

He heard the keening of a train whistle in the distance and shivered. "Well, Scully, there's more than one kind of ghost."

### End


End file.
